When you live in Europe, you meet people from all over the world. One night in early January, I found myself in a bar in Athens, talking with a Frenchman and a Quebec Canadian, both of whom worked in Luxembourg. I tried my high school French on them, and though they complimented me on my pronunciation, we soon switched back to English, the lingua franca of most such international encounters.

We got to talking about traffic, and they told me that Luxembourg’s population swells by as much as a third during the work day. Huge numbers of people commute to work in the country’s financial centers from their homes in neighboring France, Belgium and Germany.

The only thing I knew about Luxembourg is that it’s small, and one of only two countries in the world with the letter “x” in its name. (The other one borders the United States.) But I learned that Luxembourg is a thriving business hub, and that cross-border commuters make up a sizable percentage of its work force.

This, of course, is a recipe for traffic congestion. Writing for BBC Capital earlier this year, Marc Auxenfants, a reporter at the Luxembourg Times, notes that Luxembourg has the highest number of passenger vehicles per capita in the European Union, and that more than 60 percent of commuters use their cars to get to work.  It sounds like a typical American urban area.

The Luxembourg government hopes that offering free public transport, beginning in March 2020, will entice people out of their cars, even if for some of them it means a slightly longer commute. How many American drivers eschew public transportation because it takes longer than driving? My friends in Boston complain that driving is slow but public transport is slower. They may be right. But you can read on a train, and trains are better for the environment and your frame of mind.

But traffic and pollution are secondary and tertiary reasons for initiating free public transportation. The primary reason, Auxenfants notes, is social: reducing the income inequality gap between rich and poor.

Like many Americans, I owned a car for much of my adult life, because I saw it as a necessity for getting to and from work. But I was spending a good chunk of my pay on all the costs of keeping a car: the price of the car itself, plus gas, insurance, repairs, maintenance and little incidental costs that seemed to come up when I could least afford them. Since parking is largely subsidized in America, I rarely had to pay to park, but cities and towns have to tax their driving and non-driving citizens alike to cover it. It was only when I gave up car ownership that I realized how much money my car had been siphoning from my earnings.
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The government of Luxembourg has rightly concluded that if lower income workers could give up their cars, they would have more money in the bank at the end of the month. They would have more money to spend on more beneficial consumer goods, and the entire economy would improve.

Luxembourg is one of Europe’s wealthier countries. But Portugal, one of the continent’s poorest, has recently embarked on a similar approach: boosting public transportation, especially in rural areas, where car ownership draws a stark line between rich and poor. And they are already seeing tangible improvements in their overall economy.

Americans tend to look at public transportation as a subsidy, sucking tax dollars from the car-owning majority to pay for a service widely seen as inconvenient and inconsistent. But public transportation is more akin to an investment, like Internet service and cell phone coverage. If you spread it to outlying areas and make it affordable, or even free, the return on the investment will be realized rather quickly.

But public transportation remains a tough sell, on both sides of the Atlantic, as Auxenfants notes near the end of his report. Liberals in the U.S, who may be all for solar power and clean energy and good environmental stewardship, seem to have a blind spot when it comes to cars. Electric cars won’t combat climate change if the electricity to run them comes from coal plants. Good, solid, scientific reasons abound for reducing the worldwide vehicle fleet. But from the perspective of the individual car owner, the economic case being made in Luxembourg and Portugal may be more compelling.

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